ADDICTION BLOG

Fake Pills In The Street On The Rise

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Mexican drug cartels are manufacturing tremendous amounts of fake pills that are made to look like prescription painkillers. The DEA has conducted seizures between January and March of 2019 where 30 percent of the pills had deadly levels of fentanyl. Uttam Dhillon is the acting Administrator of the DEA and he explains that these cartels are taking advantage of the opioid epidemic sweeping the nation. These cartels are sending fake pills in mass to the United States to be dispersed throughout the country.

Illegally produced fentanyl is being seen more and more on the streets. In recent years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in combination with the DEA’s 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment have shown that this illegally made substance is a reoccurring factor seen in drug overdoses.

The Opioid Conundrum

The opioid crisis is a difficult challenge to overcome for the United States. Overprescribing prescription pills has lead many individuals who were not intending to abusing these medications to become addicted. There has been a massive push for medical providers to reduce the amount of these prescriptions that they provide to their patients. As a result, the availability of medical-grade opioids has been limited. Individuals who want these medications then seek to find them on the black market. What they get in return, they can never be sure of, and these street pills have taken center stage in fatal overdoses.

Eventually, those who went to the streets to find these medications also ran into heroin. Heroin is significantly cheaper, around 10 times less expensive. Many of these individuals began taking heroin because of the cost. Additionally, fentanyl on the street is often mixed with heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine for a deadly cocktail.

Overdose Deaths

A study done by the Boston Medical Center found that a little over 1 percent of those overdose deaths had an active prescription for opioids. An astounding 61.4 percent of the deceased died because of heroin, 45.3 percent perished due to fentanyl. For 20 percent of these fatalities, both heroin and fentanyl were mixed and found in the deceased systems.

There were over 47,000 Americans that lost their lives in 2017 because of opioid overdoses, heroin, and illegally made fentanyl as reported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Approximately 6 percent of those individuals that abuse prescription pills will eventually begin using heroin.

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